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BOOK REVIEW
To stitch a tapestry of trauma
A good book stays with a reader long after they’ve read the last word and placed it back on the shelf. It leaves an impression on the mind, whether because the action was exhilarating, the characters raw and real, or because reading it felt like coming back to a home you never knew you had. This last type of book is rare—we have maybe encountered a handful in our lifetimes, and they were all fiction—all, that is, except for Aanchal Malhotra’s Remnants of a Separation (HarperCollins India, 2018).
Remnants is a compilation of ethnographic research into the Partition of India, conducted by Aanchal Malhotra as part of her MFA thesis for Montreal’s Concordia University. It is, in a way, a museum presented as a book. Malhotra’s research is in “material memory”, which constitutes a piecing together of the near past, not through supposedly impartial journals or ledgers, but through heirlooms and trinkets that collectively form a tapestry of the climactic events of 1947.
The book is structured as an anthology of stories, each centring an object—a pashmina shawl, a sword, cutlery—all of which the Partition survivors kept with them when they were forced to migrate or remain in the tumult. One could read the chapters at random and follow them perfectly, but those who read them as they are given will feel a curator’s touch in the layout. It is subtle, but Malhotra ensures that we seldom read the same kind of story twice in a row. One might read of an upper class Muslim woman displaced to Pakistan, before moving onto a Hindu man of similar stature, sent the opposite way, and then to the scarring recollections of a military officer and the atrocities he witnessed. While reading their stories serially under Malhotra’s curation, the transformation of the personal to the collective reveals meaningful similarities: how most of these families believed that the Partition was a distant political turmoil, and how they never expected their neighbours and friends of differing faiths to turn violent on each other overnight.
Malhotra’s focus on heirlooms serves to ground every narrative to a single universal question: what possession would you save if your life burned to the ground? These choices in themselves were loaded—author Gurcharan Das’ grandmother, Shib Dai Verma, believed that the migration would be temporary, and so she left every single room and almirah in their erstwhile Lyallpur home locked up, bringing 51 keys with her for each keyhole that lay in waiting. They never returned. But Azra Haq knew that their departure was permanent, and so the pearls they took with them remains an altogether different kind of remnant of a life left behind.
Being an ethnographic research, these memories are all presented in the form of conversations, and Malhotra’s ability to translate interview notes into cohesive stories is masterful. Each narrator is allowed utterly to be themselves—if poet Prabhjot Kaur’s pronunciation is described to be “an amalgamated accent that had once been Punjabi,” then Lt Gen S N Sharma’s speech is said to be “refined, with the slightest tinge of a lingering British accent.” Malhotra’s research is extensive, and more can be found online, but her published book contains stories from a diverse selection of people in terms of gender, religion, social status, occupation, and whether they were forced to cross the border or not, and when. A somewhat common characteristic appears to be their levels of literacy, so that most of the interviewees are either highly educated, or believed strongly in educating their future generations because they were deprived of it themselves.
As author and researcher, Malhotra is constantly present in the prose—and what gorgeous, heartfelt prose! With her words, blissful childhood days give way to the very real trauma and tragedy of leaving one’s home and boarding train compartments filled with murdered strangers, and building life anew in a place where the language, culture, and locality are all unfamiliar. Reading these memories imprint you with the dawning realisation of just what it means to be born of this subcontinent.
Yet as an interviewer and curator, she limits her role only insofar as to unlock the necessary information. She knows when to ask questions, when to prod for details, and when to meet a recollection with silence. She uses the latter, graver intervals to question her authority and her implicit biases over these stories that will eventually be published in a book bearing her own name, bringing an integrity and uncommon conscientiousness to the handling of the historical material at her disposal.
If one is left wanting for anything, it is the analysis of the objects themselves. The amnesia, trauma, and even indifference of each interviewee regarding Partition are all drawn out wonderfully in each chapter because of the space that Malhotra gives them to speak freely. Their recollections take us far and deep back in time. But in the process, the “remnant” in question grows absent. While the objects are primarily meant to serve as catalysts for memory, mining them for data based on their shape, design, material used, and present condition using a degree of expertise would have lent the book another fascinating angle. Equally interesting would have been the inclusion of individuals from more explicitly working class backgrounds, as well as people who moved or belong to erstwhile East Bengal—Malhotra carried out her research mainly across present day Pakistan, India, and UK.
These absences are seldom felt while reading the interviews, however, because they accomplish what they set out to do. In each and every story in this book, one is reacquainted with the intergenerational trauma of Partition, told through different perspectives. Partition is a memory that still runs fresh in many of our blood, and it is a trauma that we, as a people, must acknowledge, confront, and process, because it runs prevalent in our society, in the policies we make, and the way we treat one another. Seventy three years later, we find ourselves on the cusp of the same religious tensions that caused the bloodbath of 1947 in the first place, and it is not until we make peace with the past that we can stop repeating these mistakes. The stories and messages within this book are now more poignant than ever.
Aanchal Malhotra’s full archives can be accessed at @museumofmaterialmemory on Instagram.
Sarah Anjum Bari is head of Daily Star Books. Reach her at sarah.anjum.bari@gmail.com or
@wordsinteal on Instagram.
Yaameen Al-Muttaqi works with robots and writes stories of dragons, magic, friendship, and hope. Send him a raven at yaameen3112@gmail.com.
PHOTO COLLAGE: Kazi Tahsin Agaz Apurbo
“It is, in a way, a museum presented as a book. Malhotra’s research is in “material memory”, which constitutes a piecing together of the near past through heirlooms and trinkets that collectively form a tapestry of the climactic events of 1947.”
Yaameen Al-Muttaqi and Sarah Anjum Bari